more than what you can see
by blenderfullasarcasm
Summary: Everyone who lives remotely near the Kudou mansion believes that it's haunted. (And they're not wrong about that. It's just…not for the reason they think.) / Day 1 of Spooktober (Haunted Mansion)


Everyone who lives remotely near the Kudou mansion believes that it's haunted.

.

_(And they're not wrong about that. It's just…not the reason they think.) _

_._

The thing is, they think that it's haunted because the Kudou parents barely ever actually live there - they're rich people, the kind that can donate half their income to charity, burn half of what's left, and still have enough money left over to live comfortably in any of their seven houses around the world - because they're off traveling the world. No one had realized that they'd left their son behind until they'd seen him leaving for school, and they're still half-convinced that that had been an apparition, a hallucination brought on by the early morning mist.

.

_(Shinichi sometimes felt that way, too. More so, now that he's Conan. Like an apparition floating through the motions of everyday life. Breakfast, school, lunch, more school, murder victim, homework, murder victim, back to the Agency for dinner, TV or reading, and, if he's lucky, no more cases. He's not usually lucky. Rinse. Repeat.) _

_._

Their son comes and goes at odd hours. On school days, he leaves the mansion so early that even the sun isn't awake yet, and he has a tendency to return only when the moon has comfortably risen. No one ever seems to see him in daylight, and whispers follow him whenever someone has trouble sleeping or wakes up early enough to see him.

.

_(Conan does the same thing. If he doesn't leave before dawn, he has a tendency to run into cases on the way to class, and the teachers are starting to declare that stumbling across a corpse is not a valid excuse for being late to class. He misses walking to school with Ran.) _

_._

_Where does he go? _

_Why does he leave so early? _

_Is he - ? _

_No, he couldn't possibly be - _

_...a vampire? _

_._

_(Ha. Conan laughs in the face of the supernatural. Vampires don't exist, except for the weird guy who made arrangements for his granddaughter to use his corpse as a tool for revenge. And it wasn't like he was even a real vampire.) _

_._

The whole block breathes a sigh of relief when the Mouri girl shows up at noon one Saturday and drags the Kudou boy outdoors. He doesn't burn - at least, not more than a pale human would. His more superstitious neighbors stop stockpiling garlic, which is good, because the entire block was starting to smell faintly.

.

_(Shinichi liked playing soccer, sure. He was pretty good at it, but he preferred solving mysteries. Besides, it wasn't like he could _**_stop_**_corpses from landing on top of him. Besides, Sunday was the only day he could make up for his truly astounding sleep debt. The more time he spent sleeping and studying, the less time he spent outside where crime seemed to be attracted to him. It was better this way, really.) _

_._

And then the Kudou boy disappears.

The newspapers say that he's missing under 'suspicious circumstances,' but everyone knows that means 'presumed dead.'

.

_(He's not. Not quite. But it's a near thing.) _

_._

A month later, the professor down the road starts taking care of a little girl (though she seems to be taking more care of him than the other way around). The Mouri girl and her bougie friend (they conveniently forget that they live on a block in one of the most expensive places in town) come to the house to clean it. That's when the screaming starts.

.

_(Going from six to sixteen and back again in a matter of seconds is _**_painful_**_. But who else is there to test an antidote?) _

_._

It's not frequent, by any means, and there's no discernible pattern, but it happens when they least expect it, when they've been lulled into a false sense of security, and it always comes from the direction of the Kudou house. A long, blood-curdling, nerve-wracking, bone-aching scream, the kind that makes their skin want to crawl right off their bodies and hide under the bed.

There are a lot of sleepless nights around the lock, everyone on edge as they wait for the next round of ghostly wails.

.

_(Shinichi had thought he could get used to the pain. Conan knew better.) _

_._

And then the children start showing up.

.

_(Conan _**_tries _**_to keep them away from his house, because he still hasn't taken down the old pictures of him when he was six the first time around, and it's usually fine because he can divert them to the professors. His neighbors help him out, possibly unknowingly, the few times that he can't guide their thoughts away from the mansion. He doesn't really understand why, but he's grateful.) _

_._

They try to stop curious children from going in - really, they do - but it's not enough. They're too interested in the 'haunted mansion.'

They sneak their way in, and after they leave, the sometimes-screaming stops.

The whole block waits with baited breath, because surely it would happen again -

But it doesn't.

.

_(The professor creates a new type of sound-proofing foam, which proceeds to explode, covering the entire basement. Despite the mess, and Conan's general lack of faith in anything the professor creates that explodes, it works incredibly well.) _

_._

What happens instead is that they start to hear reports of the children - the Edogawa boy, mostly - running into murders with the same frequency the Kudou boy used to. It's alarming, and the whole neighborhood watches closely, cautiously, as if waiting for something to snap.

.

_(Conan eyes his neighbors - Haibara's neighbors, really, now - warily. They've been playing close attention to him for over a week now, and it's starting to make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up straight.) _

_._

Then someone puts that together with the lack of screaming and connects some dots. The conclusion they come to is...incredible, outlandish, but…

...not impossible.

.

_(They're missing a couple dots.) _

_._

It's clear that the ghost haunting the Kudou mansion is gone.

.

_(Conan's made some new friends and they're fun, even though he feels like he's baby-sitting most of the time. He doesn't spend quite as much time harping at Haibara for antidotes or hanging listlessly around the Kudou mansion.) _

_._

And the children are now cursed to come across corpses wherever they go.

.

_(No, it's still Shin - no, it's Conan, now, and for the foreseeable future - who is cursed to be a corpse magnet. Only him.) _

_._

When they went into the Kudou mansion, the ghost of the poor Kudou boy must have latched on to them somehow, and everyone knows that he was a murder magnet. Now he's inflicting the same awful curse onto those children. Perhaps not on purpose - perhaps the children had taken something from the house, something that had been tethering him there (that bowtie the Edogawa boy wears seems familiar…).

.

_(Of course it does - it's the same bowtie, with a few modifications.) _

_._

But there's no doubt in their minds that those children have been cursed.

.

_(Conan wonders why all the houses on his street suddenly have salt lines across the window ledges.) _

_._

_See that house down there? _they say to their guests. _See that one, right there, in the middle of the block? That's the Kudou mansion. It used to be haunted until some poor little souls broke in for a test of courage - why, they couldn't have been older than seven! - and the spirit of the Kudou boy latched on to them all, especially the Edogawa boy. The poor dears, _they say, shaking their heads, and people believe them.

.

Because, really, it's more plausible than the truth.

.

And, anyway, it's not like they're wrong, exactly, about Conan being haunted by the ghost of Kudou Shinichi.

.

.

.

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Notes:

yeah, sorry, still not tmq, but at least it's conan this time?  
the next chapter is still in the works, i promise  
.

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lol what's editing? too late i'll do it later  
(it's 4am) title from 'Last of Me' (Cicus-P)


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